Prologue

Note: The first scene has a graphic depiction of death after giving birth and can be skipped if this will be uncomfortable for the reader.

Fitzwilliam Darcy paced the bedroom, his heavy boots muffled by the thick carpet.

He forced himself not to wince with each cry of pain from Anne.

His mother had begged him to marry on her deathbed. And now after three miscarriages, his cousin had finally kept a child to term. Darcy paused by the window and stared sightlessly out at the grounds of Pemberley.

He wanted a son. For both himself and for Anne. If there was a son, he would never subject his wife to this torture again. And he wanted Anne to be well… even though a vile part of his mind suggested to Darcy that if she died, then he could marry a woman towards whom he felt a greater attraction.

When that thought crossed his mind, Darcy hated himself.

Anne would not die. Such ought not happen. Anne was a good person, better by far than he had realized when he married her years previously.

"You are doing so well, my dear." He sat on the chair next to her once more and took her hand. He knew his presence greatly comforted her.

Though it was unusual for a gentleman to be present in the birthing room, Anne had begged for his presence, if he could bear it. I won’t be so frightened if you are there .

Anne squeezed his hand with more strength than he would have thought her thin-boned frame could manage. Darcy kept his voice steady and reassuring. "Just a little longer."

Another guttural groan was his only answer. Darcy clenched his other fist, hating his uselessness.

If only he could do something… anything that would help. Anything to relieve the shame and guilt that burned in his guts. She loved him with all her heart, and he loved her as a cousin and a friend.

Everything that could be done had been done. What remained was God’s decision. When Anne's labour had started that morning, he had sent for the accoucheur immediately. The most experienced man in the county had arrived posthaste, assuring them both that everything was well under control, and that there was nothing in Anne’s pain that was beyond the ordinary during a first birth.

The physician had a comforting, soft bedside manner. But though Darcy wished he could trust the doctor, he knew too much of the world and the medical profession to believe that impression of confidence. Often the physician simply presided over the Almighty choosing the fate of the ill.

Standing next to the accoucheur was his apprentice, a man of about twenty, and in the background Mrs. Reynolds and two maids hovered, ready to offer any assistance and to run for anything that the house could provide. Not that they had anything which might truly help.

Anne’s skin was slick with sweat, her face contorted in a rictus of pain.

"I am here, Anne.” Darcy brushed a damp tendril of hair from her brow. "You are so brave."

“Don’t tell me that.” She turned her head towards him, blue eyes bright with tears. "I am afraid," she whispered.

A lump formed in Darcy's throat. "Nothing to fear. There is nothing to fear. You have nothing to fear. All will be well."

He wished to convince himself. Anne had been delicate her entire life. This was his doing. He should have taken a vow of celibacy and lived as a monk once he had married her.

Darcy’s parents had both been of a serious and religious mindset, and their son had inherited those attitudes from them. He would not — could not and remain himself — break those vows he had made to Anne before God and society at the wedding altar.

To not make the effort to have an heir with his lawful wife would have been ridiculous. Aunt Catherine herself had gone so far as to proffer advice about how best to accomplish that task when they had not yet successfully done so two months after the marriage had been solemnized. Lady Catherine had already determined at that early date that it was evident that her benighted nephew would not be able to manage such a supremely important matter without her expert knowledge.

After the third miscarriage, Darcy had suggested that they cease to try. Anne had bled so much, and the child had been far enough advanced that the physician had been able to identify the miniscule corpse as a boy. Losing each child hurt her.

But Anne had been insistent that they continue to make the attempt, despite his concerns.

The accoucheur's voice broke into Darcy’s reverie. "Now is the time, Mrs. Darcy. Bear down with all your might."

Anne cried out, her grip tightening painfully on Darcy's hand. He gritted his teeth, murmuring encouraging phrases that he hoped were soothing.

A wash of blood came from her body with a scream. And then… then there was a bulge between her legs. For a moment Darcy was confused, that was not how her most intimate region ordinarily looked.

The accoucheur said in his soft professional voice, “Yes, yes. The top of the head. Not a breech child, good. Wait… wait… now bear down again, Mrs. Darcy.”

And then with a gasp and a scream from Anne the head came completely out.

A tiny head, slightly misshapen from being squeezed through the narrow canal. Purple, covered in slimy mucus.

The accoucheur reached forward and gripped the top of the child. The shoulders came out, and he told Anne to push again. Easily and without any difficulty the whole tiny body came out.

There was a sense of everything changing, of rightness, of… perfection as Darcy looked at the tiny child in the doctor’s arms.

Darcy stared at the miniscule creature.

The accoucheur without any delay handed the child to his assistant and with his hand held the umbilical cord.

It did not look like what Darcy had expected, it was thick and endlessly twisted and purple.

He gripped Anne’s hand as the accoucheur tied a silk ribbon around the umbilical cord right above the child’s belly, and then with a swift professional motion he snipped it off with a pair of sharp scissors. His assistant took the child — his child — to the basin of warm water that had been prepared. He cleaned off the child who now wailed and screamed.

Darcy’s chest unclenched at the sound. His child had a lusty loud wail, a healthy sound.

The body was so tiny. It looked so odd covered in purple slime.

The assistant handed the child back to the accoucheur, wrapped in white cloths after only a quick moment — on the basis of his reading Darcy had been most insistent that they would not tightly swaddle the child — the accoucheur offered the bundle to Darcy, saying, “I hope you are not disappointed, Mr. Darcy, but the child is a girl.”

Darcy looked into the girl’s face, and even though it was a girl, it was as though he was looking at the cheeks and facial features of his father and grandfather. His stomach jumped.

How could he be disappointed at such a moment?

His heart was too full of how she was perfect, and she was his.

A daughter.

Not a son and heir to continue the name, but she was precisely everything he could have ever hoped for. He held her in his arms, feeling awkward as the accoucheur ordered him to keep the little head supported. She looked at him with wide eyes, and then stuck her tongue out to lick her lips.

“Ah, the child is hungry,” the accoucheur said. “You have a wet nurse selected?”

Darcy nodded, and Mrs. Reynolds went out without any instructions to call the young mother up.

“Let me see her,” Anne whispered with a croak.

Tears streamed down Anne's face as she beheld their child for the first time. "Oh Fitzwilliam, she is perfect."

“She is.” Darcy could not tear his eyes away from the tiny, scrunched face. Nothing else mattered in the world besides this new life they had created.

Darcy carefully put the baby, who started to cry again, down in Anne’s arms. Anne held her and looked at her through happy watery eyes.

“Now Mrs. Darcy, you must prepare to bear down one last time, so that the placenta might also be delivered,” the accoucheur said.

What followed was a period of twenty minutes of the doctor giving orders to Anne to push, while occasionally tugging softly on the umbilical cord.

As this occurred, the wet nurse came into the room. Nell was the wife of one of Darcy’s upper servants, and her own son was ready to be weaned at nearly two years of age. She took the babe from Anne and sat down with her on a chair nearby. Darcy did not want his child to leave the room. He could not stop looking at her, at the tiny delicate nose, face, cheeks, toes.

Nell expertly settled the girl on the breast, letting her begin her first meal.

The accoucheur said, “She quickly begins to feed, that is a good sign — you pressed out the breast? So that the flow would not be too great for the infant?”

The wet nurse nodded, and the accoucheur returned his focus to Anne.

At last, a big bloody thing was expelled out from Anne’s body. The accoucheur said with a smile as it did, “Very good, Mrs. Darcy, and now let us see if — oh my.”

The man sucked in a deep breath.

With a sense of horror, Darcy watched a large crimson stain spreading over the bed linens around Anne that had been changed after the babe had come out.

From the expression on the face of the accoucheur and his assistant, Darcy knew that this amount of bleeding was not normal and expected as the preceding flows of blood had been.

“John, the pitcher of water,” the accoucheur said, studying the expelled placenta. “It looks intact…”

The assistant handed the physician a tall pitcher of water that he had had placed outside in the frosty night air.

The doctor lifted it up several feet above Anne’s belly, and then as his assistant held Anne still, he deliberately poured the water onto her stomach.

She shrieked. “It is so cold.”

This changed not the doctor’s steady hand at all.

As soon as the pitcher was drained, he handed the pitcher to one of the housemaids who stood about waiting to be useful. “John, the cloths.”

The assistant nodded and let go of Anne, while grabbing several clean linen rags that had been placed on the side of the room.

The accoucheur took from his case a dark glass bottle and opened it.

A sharp smell of vinegar filled the room.

The assistant handed the accoucheur the linen cloths and he soaked them with the liquid of a bottle that he had brought in his case with him.

He pulled the bed linens away from Anne and laid the cloths on her belly.

Seeing Darcy’s astonished stare as he watched these proceedings, the accoucheur said to him almost offhandedly, “We must stimulate the uterus so that it contracts and closes off the blood vessels.”

There was so much blood. The assistant pulled the first set of cloths away, and replaced them with additional linens, and in an instant, they were also soaked with the bright red fluid.

Darcy saw that Anne was becoming pale, her lips trembling.

“Put the babe on her breast,” the accoucheur ordered, “that often will stimulate the contraction of the uterus.”

Tears leaked from Anne’s eyes. Darcy sat by her again and took her hand.

Anne sighed happily when the child was placed on her. “She is so perfect. Do not name her for my mother. Or after me, though tell her that I loved her dearly, and—”

“You will not die,” Darcy said sharply. “Tell her. Tell her.”

The accoucheur was too busy, or perhaps he simply chose to pretend he had not heard Darcy’s words. His assistant had soaked a sponge with a brandy that had a particularly strong scent from another open bottle, and now he pressed it up Anne’s female passageway, pushing it in with two long fingers.

Blood, blood, thick, fresh flowing, not clotted at all.

Another set of bedlinens, this time exchanged by Mrs. Reynolds herself rather than one of the maids. Soaked sodden red.

Darcy’s stomach was hollow.

Anne’s arms were around the child, but her eyes had lost their brightness.

“I am glad you are here,” she said. “I am not frightened now.”

There seemed to be less blood flowing. That had to be good.

The accoucheur took one of Anne’s arms and held her wrist in that detached manner of the physician checking the pulse. He frowned and shook his head. “Thin and fast. Thin and fast. Bleeding her would do more harm than good in this case I think.”

“Why would you bleed a woman who is losing so much blood?” Darcy said, his voice in half a screech.

“It relieves the pressure on the oversubscribed blood vessels,” the doctor replied absently. As he spoke, he took a long strip of cloth and tied it tightly around one of Anne’s legs. Then he tied another around her other leg.

“What are you doing?”

“It keeps the blood in the limbs, and reduces the bleeding from the uterus, giving it more time to contract and close off the vessels on its own.”

He then tied further bonds around each arm.

Darcy’s heart hammered.

“I feel weak,” Anne said. “I can barely hold her. My belly hurts so much.”

Her lips were white, her breathing fast. Perspiration beaded on Anne’s forehead.

The accoucheur pressed his hand around Anne’s belly, where the babe had come from. It looked to Darcy as though it was visibly swelling again.

The physician said in a serious voice, “The blood is filling up in the uterus, we need to encourage it to flow out again to relieve the pressure.”

“Fitzwilliam, Fitzwilliam,” Anne said in a hoarse whisper. “Promise me…”

“Anything.”

The doctor put his hand into her again, and when he withdrew it a great gush of blood, some of it clotted, came out.

“Promise me that you will not let my mother take control of our child’s education. She always meant well, but I believe she hurt me greatly.”

You won’t die .

Those comforting words would not come. Disguise of every sort was an anathema to Darcy.

He could not tell her that she would be well, when he knew she would not be.

“I promise,” he said seriously. “I shall superintend her education in all respects.”

“Ensure she is happy. Promise me, above all, that you shall seek for her to be happy. Let her be accomplished, let her be worthy of our name, but first ensure she is happy.”

Though Darcy had sworn to himself he would never again make an oath to a dying person to comfort them, this was an oath he could willingly make from his heart. “I will. She will be happy.”

Tears came to Darcy’s eyes. The wet nurse took the babe from Anne’s weakening arms.

“It is so dark,” Anne said. Her breathing grew more rapid. Another cloth was changed to soak up the flow of blood. The accoucheur was still in motion, making some attempt to save her life. He pressed a new collection of tow and linen into Anne, but his expression was that of a man doing a thing because it was his duty, and not because he believed there would be any good outcome from it.

Her eyes closed, and for a time Darcy believed that they would never open again. But then they flickered open, she glanced around with an unfocused gaze, and she moved her hand weakly.

He took it again.

“Oh, Fitzwilliam. I have been happy. So happy since you married me.”

“I know.”

“Only… you never spoke of it,” she whispered, “but I know you do not love me as I love you. I have not made you so happy as you made me.”

“Do not say such things.”

She whispered out, “That was sad for me. You deserve to be happy. Fitzwilliam…”

“Please, Anne, do not—”

“Promise me this,” her voice was stronger now, “Promise me that you will marry again. And marry to please yourself, and to make your own heart happy.”

“I do not deserve to be happy.”

“Fitzwilliam, promise me.”

But Darcy did not reply, he only squeezed her hand tighter.

“So strange, everything seems so strange. I do believe I am floating. The world spins around before me. And I see my daughter, my little child. Name her Emily; I had a doll once who was dear to me who I called Emily.”

She lapsed into silence.

A single look at the expression upon the face of the accoucheur was enough to tell Darcy that there was little hope which remained.

For the next few minutes her breathing progressively weakened, then suddenly Anne began to convulse, her body wildly shaking up and down, the contractions expelling more globs of blood from her core. All through it Darcy held her hand.

And then, suddenly, the convulsions stopped.

Her eyes were open, glassy and unseeing.

The accoucheur took Anne’s other hand, felt for the pulse, and after waiting a minute frowned and shook his head.